Video: Guardians of Russian museums through the eyes of Andy Friberg
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Each of us, being in domestic museums, necessarily noticed women sitting in galleries and watching visitors. Photographer Andy Freeberg seems to be interested in these museum workers almost more than the works of art themselves. After all, it was the women-caretakers who became the protagonists of his “Guardians” photo series.
Guardians is a somewhat ironic but very warm collection of photographs taken in various museums in Russia. “When you look at paintings or sculptures, the presence of the caretakers becomes an integral part of your familiarity with the artwork. I find the study of these women is as intriguing as the study of the art itself,”says Andy Friberg.
The photographer's interest in the museum curators arose unexpectedly. He came to St. Petersburg in February 2008 with a very specific purpose. “I was in Russia in the 1980s and took some black and white pictures in snowy Leningrad. On this material, I wanted to build a "before and after" theme, having arrived in Russia a few years later and took new pictures, which will show the changes taking place in the Soviet Union, "says Andy Friberg. Between the shots of the landscapes of St. Petersburg streets, the photographer entered the Hermitage and saw the caretakers. These women impressed the author so much that the idea of a new project was born by itself.
According to the photographer, the women caretakers simply fascinated him. At first glance, they appear bored and uninterested in their work. However, after talking with them, Andy realized that in fact this was not the case. “Most of them love their job. They know a lot about art and many of them have been true professionals in the past. We met retired scientists, historians, dentists. One woman spends three hours every day to get to work, and claims that this is much better than sitting at the doorway on a bench and complaining about illness, as old women do.
The first photographs from the Guardians series were taken at the Hermitage in the winter of 2008, but the project did not end there. In June of the same year, Andy Friberg came to Russia again and enlarged his collection with photographs of the caretakers of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, as well as the Tretyakov Gallery and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.
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